A Conversation with Robert Kendall

Judy Malloy
Anna and I are pleased to welcome Hypertext poet Robert Kendall to the
Interactive Art conference.

Kendall is the author of a book-length hypertext poem, A LIFE SET FOR
TWO (Eastgate Systems, 1996), and his interactive poetry has appeared
in The Little Magazine and Version Box, and is forthcoming in
the Eastgate anthology of hypertext poetry.

"Like any poem struggling to get back to preverbal basics, my electronic
poem A LIFE SET FOR TWO dwells in the realm of the figurative --- but
not just through figures of speech," writes for a forthcoming article in Leonardo.
"It taps the multiple layers of symbolic language underlying computer software,
the electronic tropes behind the virtualities of interface and process that
glow on the screen. The reader's interaction with the poem and its own predefined
algorithms combine to create a malleable text that changes with each reading."

And in an introduction to a talk a at Xerox PARC, he notes that "This
poem uses an unusual system of dynamic hypertext in an effort to make the
interface more immediately and transparently responsive to the reader's
needs, while enabling the poem to reflect the dynamic structure of
thought processes and memory. The work also incorporates the interface
elements into the central metaphors of the poem."

Here is the bio that Robert sent us.

Robert Kendall (http://www.wenet.net/~rkendall)
is the author of a book-length hypertext poem, A Life Set for Two (Eastgate
Systems, 1996), and his interactive poetry has appeared in The Little Magazine
and Version Box, and is forthcoming in the Eastgate anthology of hypertext
poetry. In the form of a multimedia installation with original music, his
electronic poetry has been exhibited at sites in many cities, including the
Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, the Dodge Poetry Festival
in Waterloo, New Jersey, and the Small Press Book Fair in New York City. A
videotape version of the work was shown at the Second Annual Poetry Video
Festival in Chicago and on Manhattan Cable TV. Kendall curated an exhibit
of digital and interactive artwork for the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia,
which included his own work.

Kendall's printed poetry has appeared widely in magazines (including Contact
II, River Styx, and Indiana Review), and several anthologies have
included his work. A Wandering City (Cleveland State University Poetry
Center, 1992), his first book of poems, won the CSU Poetry Center Prize. Kendall
has read his poetry at numerous locations in many states and in Europe, as
well as on Manhattan Cable TV and nationally syndicated public radio. In 1995
he received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship for literature,
and his electronic poetry has earned him a New Forms Regional Grant Program
Award.

Kendall lectures frequently about interactive literature and electronic
publishing, and he teaches hypertext poetry and fiction through the on-line
DIAL program of the New School for Social Research in New York. He has also
taught poetry in high schools through the Dodge Poets program in New
Jersey.

Over 100 of his articles about computer technology and computers in the
arts have appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, PC Magazine, PC Computing,
Computer Life, Electronic Musician, and many other national publications.
Kendall was born and raised in Canada. He earned an MA degree from New York
University, sojourned in New Jersey for ten years, and currently lives in
Menlo Park, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Judy Malloy
Welcome Rob! And congradulations on the recent publication of A LIFE SET
FOR TWO. What brought you from print poetry to computer mediated poetry?

Robert Kendall
Thanks, Judy. It's good to be here (wherever "here" may be in
cyberspace). Looks like Arts Wire has a nice conferencing
system.

I first started seriously trying to combine computers and
poetry about 7 years ago, when I was dabbling with some of the
earliest multimedia authoring systems that came out for the PC.
These programs were intended mostly for creating business
presentations, but I thought "Wouldn't it be great to apply
some of these things to poetry." It seemed to me that they
might provide a solution to a problem of sorts that I'd come up
against: At the time I was giving a lot of live poetry
readings, and there were a few poems that just didn't seem well
suited for reading aloud, but I liked the poems and wanted a
way of turning them into a performance and presenting them to
an audience.

One of the poems had a number of blank underlines in it (for example, the
title of the poem was It All Comes Down to _______). How do you read
something like that to an audience? So I turned the poem into a kinetic work
for the computer screen, a sort of written performance. The words were displayed
a few at a time using different fonts, colors, graphical backgrounds, transition
effects, a few interactive elements, and so on. Then like a madman I hauled
my full-sized desktop computer to my next reading and set it up there so the
audience could look at the poem after the reading. I was fully prepared for
people to hate it and recognize me for the lunatic I was becoming, but to
my astonishment they loved it. So I started doing more of this.

Since I was working extensively with MIDI at the time (I have a
Master's degree in music), the next step was to compose a
soundtrack for one of these kinetic visual poems, or SoftPoems
as I called them. I've always loved combining poetry and music
in various ways, so it was wonderful being able to work in this
new hybrid form, creating what could be considered visual songs.

These early pieces had a few interactive elements to them, but
the interaction wasn't really crucial. Around this time I
became dimly aware of people like Rod Willmot and Michael Joyce
who were working with hypertext. I quickly realized that
interactivity was the most exciting element that the computer
could bring to poetry. Here was the chance to do something
really new. I also liked programming, so doing a poem that was
part computer program, part text would give me a single outlet
for two of my creative interests. It's very satisfying when
seemingly unconnected strands in your life can come together in
this way.

I managed to get a grant to help fund the creation of a large-scale interactive
poem, so I was off and running. I starting working in Visual BASIC and three
and a half years later, the final result was A Life Set for Two, which
recently came out from Eastgate.

Judy Malloy
Thanks Rob. A couple of diverse questions come to mind -- probably too
many questions -- so answer what you want when you want!

Your music background reminds me that when I first began to work in
strategies for computer mediated literature, I spent a little time
looking at what computer musicians and new musicians had done and was
really impressed.

Not only were musicians were among the first to realize the potential of
computers in the arts, but also musical structures have already explored some
of the word ordering strategies that computers make possible. I got the idea
for Wasting Time (where 3 characters seek/think simultaneously) from
listening to a trio - now I can't remember the work but the other night I
was watching Gilbert Sullivan's the Pirates of Penzance on TV and some
of the duets were done in this way - simultaneous but very different words
from characters in the same place at the same time. You speak of "visual songs",
I am wondering if musical structures have influenced your work in other ways?

Do you generally do your own programing, as opposed to using tools like
Storyspace? Do you have any thoughts about this? How does effect the
work?

Jeff Gates was recently asking me what I thought were the best
interactive art sites. Coincidentally I'd been flumoxed by the same
(self-asked) question in preparing material for a SFAI course on the web.
What were 10 years ago, "new" ideas of interactivity have been
incorporated intro mainstream web page design - reader choice, pathing,
incorporation of reader response - and it is harder to separate out
new, experimental interactive works. I'm wondering if and how your ideas
about interactivity have changed (?)

Robert Kendall
Some meaty questions!

Yes, musicians rushed eagerly into computer technology while
those from other artistic disciplines stood on the sidelines
and watched suspiciously. Technology has always been more
integral to music in an obvious way than it has been to the
other arts. New developments in musical style have often hinged
upon technological improvements in instruments: Equal
temperament (a new way of tuning keyboard instruments) made new
types of exotic chromaticism possible, as did the addition of
valves to brass instruments. The keyboard styles of Beethoven
and Chopin simply wouldn't have been possible on older
instruments. To play or compose for any instrument, you have to
understand the technology behind that instrument, so musicians
can't be afraid of the technology.

Being a musician probably made me more aware of the technology
underlying my poetry. Writing is a highly sophisticated
technology, but very few writers think of it that way. The idea
of this technology changing on them gives many writers fits,
whereas musicians must stay constantly on top of the
technological changes that are periodically made to their
instruments.

As for the influence of specific musical forms, I think the theme and variation
form probably had a strong influence on A Life Set for Two, though
this hadn't really occured to me until now.

I did all my own programming for A Life Set for Two, and it was an
immense but rewarding task. When I was working on my earlier e-poems, I was
using off-the-shelf environments that let you do a lot of basic things quickly
and easily, but ultimately this became very limiting. Working with Visual
BASIC, I could do just about anything I wanted. My artistic horizons were
limited only by my imagination and my need to eat and sleep. I used Storyspace
for the Eastgate anthology poem, mostly because I wanted to produce something
that would be available for Mac as well as Windows, since everything else
of mine is PC only. There were things I wanted to do with this poem that Storyspace
just wouldn't allow, but I felt the tradeoff was worth it.

I think doing your own programming for this sort of work gives you an incalculable
advantage, since you don't have to fit your ideas into the canned interface
of an off-the-shelf hypertext system. People rarely think of it this way,
but when you write computer-based literature, you're really writing in two
languages at once--English (or whatever your spoken language happens to be)
and programming code. Binary code is a means of communication as much as English--it
just communicates different things. When you use Storyspace or plain-vanilla
HTML, you're essentially incorporating someone else's predefined formulas
into your writing, modifying them as best you can to suit your needs. When
I wrote A Life, I could build the hypertext system and the interface
around the poem as the poem evolved. The interface design itself became as
much a direct means of expression as the text itself. The final artwork is
a hybrid of software design and text, just as a song is a hybrid of music
and text.

Now I should also say that it isn't always a drawback from an
artistic standpoint to work within a restrictive software
environment. For centuries poets have been writing fruitfully
within the constraints of the sonnet, the villanelle, etc.
Artists will often deliberately work in a restrictive medium
because being able to push against its limitations gives the
work a certain unique tension. A charcoal-on-paper drawing or a
piece of music for solo violin isn't inherently inferior to oil
on canvas or a symphonic work. It's just that the world would
be a poorer place without all those oil paintings and
symphonies as well.

There is also the practical consideration. Most writers just
don't have the patience or the skills necessary to build things
from the ground up in an industrial-strength programming
language. If it weren't for Storyspace or HTML, they just
wouldn't be working in hypertext at all. In fact, the current
boom in hypertext poetry and fiction is largely attributable to
Storyspace and HTML.

My ideas about interactivity are constantly evolving as I come to understand
the interactive medium better. Some things you learn by watching what other
writers are doing. Some things you just have to learn by trial and error.
Other things you have to learn by watching how people interact with your work.
One thing that's become more and more evident to me over the years is the
need for my interactive writing to be dynamic. Hypertext systems are usually
static--that is, they let you create your nodes and link them together, and
the nodes and links are then fixed for perpetuity. The system I created for
A Life, on the other hand, monitors the reader's progress at all times
and constantly reconfigures the work to try to meet the reader's needs at
any given moment. The system adds or removes links or modifies the text within
nodes as appropriate. Another aim is to let the system respond to the reader
on many different levels, not just on the level of "now you can follow this
link or follow that link." I want to give the reader control over the large-scale
organizational principles behind the work, which means implementing these
principles as software functions and giving the reader access to them.

Judy Malloy
Well, I can't argue with any of that! It is very close to my way of
thinking -- particularly in the area of doing your own programming
although I like HTML because it is so very basic and can be used in so
many different ways/accessed so easily by so many. I don't think HTML is
at all like StorySpace which is a very complex, evolved, powerful tool
that works very well for some writers but is different from my way of
thinking.

>The final artwork is a hybrid of software design and text, just as a
>song is a hybrid of music and text.

That's an excellent way of putting it.

>The system adds or removes links or modifies the text within nodes as
>appropriate. Another aim is to let the system respond to the reader on
>many different levels, not just on the level of "now you can follow
>this link or follow that link."

This sounds like a fairly deep level of interactivity - one that would
take some study of how readers "use" your work and you say:

>Other things you have to learn by watching how people interact with your
>work..

This is something we've talked about with other guests on Interactive and
I recall that Nancy Paterson reacted negatively this question -- thinking
of it more in terms of changing your work to suit viewers and finding it,
the way a visual artist would, an alien idea. But, I have changed not
the words but the interface in some instances when I've seen people
"using" the work in an entirely different way than I imagined. Can you
tell us a little more about how you do this, why you think it is
important?

Robert Kendall
Yes, I think the Web is the wave of the future for interactive
literature. I'm firmly convinced that in the near future most
poetry and literary short fiction will be published on the Web
either instead of or in addition to appearing in print. The
economics of print publishing just doesn't make sense for these
genres. There are too many production and distribution
problems. Even though most people aren't yet hooked up to the
Web, it's often easier to reach a broad readership on the Web
than with a printed lit mag. Image what it will be like when
Web access becomes ubiquitous.

If the Web becomes the main vehicle for disseminating linear
poetry, it would be silly to continue to distribute interactive
poetry on disk. HTML has a lot going for it, and if you're
willing to get your hands dirty with JavaScript or Java, you
have a lot of flexibility with what you can do. In a few years
we'll be able to do more on the Web than we can now do on
CD-ROM. I'm planning to put my current hypertext project on the
Web when it's done.

The issue you raise about changing interface design in response
to "usability testing" is an interesting one. I rarely change
the text of my poems in response to criticism. Art isn't a
democratic process in which your critics vote on how your poem
or painting or piece of music should be and then you follow the
mandate of the majority and revise accordingly. Art is a very
personal form of expression. The only critic an artist is
obliged to satisfy is the one in his or her own head. When you
create a work, some people will get it and others won't, and
that's life.

I think that adapting a software interface in response to how people are
actually using it is an entirely different thing. This isn't a matter of changing
what your work is expressing, it's a matter of fixing the mechanics of how
your work functions in its physical environment. A sculptor may have to do
some testing to figure out how to engineer a large sculpture. If he changes
the design so that the piece won't collapse under its own weight, that's not
sacrificing artistic integrity, it's being practical. Similarly, a composer
will have to modify a piece if it turns out to be impossible to play on an
instrument, or a playwright might modify stage directions if they are confusing
to directors. If your average user can't figure out how to use your interface
or if users are typically using it in an unexpected way that undermines the
effectiveness of the work, then you've got a problem before people even get
to the point of trying to interpret your piece.

Here's an example of the sort of change I'm talking about: A Life Set
for Two can shift through different emotional moods, and there are different
versions of text sections to correspond to these different moods. The interface
includes an option that lets the reader change the poem's mood periodically.
I had assumed that people would read several sections in one mood before they
chose to shift "emotional gears." This is important to adequately establish
and explore one mood before the poem shifts to another. Yet one reader sat
down and immediately began changing the mood as often as she could, so she
could compare the same passages of text in different moods. I realized that
this would be a logical thing for a reader to do, even though it probably
wouldn't generate a very satisfying reading. So I modified the interface so
that it didn't display the mood control buttons until the reader had already
read several nodes in the same mood. This guaranteed the effect I wanted but
didn't sacrifice anything to get it.

Robert Kendall
Judy, I'd be interested to know what kind of interface changes
you've made after watching people interact with your work.

Timothy Collins
Hi Robert, interesting conversation here. I like the clarity in your
seperation of the ideals of individual expression from the materials/tools
of production.

As a teacher though I find that its this same narcissistic autonomy that
undermines the need to teach or critique the material and tools of
interactive production. Especially in cases where the "tools" are
apparently seemless elements of production. Comparing interactivity to the
engineering of a sculpture which either does or does not stand is
comparing the subjectective interpretation of interactivity with the
objective reality of the sculptures defiance of gravity. (It would be
more correct to compare interactivity to brushstrokes in painting).

I've wrestled with these notions, with a number of students here at CMU.
Enamored of the tools and romance of art and technology the idea that
interactivity needs testing is most often interpreted as an attack on
their personal freedom to act as autonomous creative beings.

In light of this I would ask you if the autonomy of the arts isn't an
irrelevant concept in a genre where interaction is the definitive
element? I would argue that you can either have interaction (dialogue) or
you can have personal expression (monologue). These are mutually
exclusive concepts. To create a successful pedagogical approach to
interactivity we need to subsume the modernist defense of creative autonomy
and assume the artists ability to realize creative product in relation
to, or with, rather than for their audience.

Robert Kendall
What is interactivity? What does it mean for art? How do we use it?

These are huge questions and everyone has to wrestle with
them and come up with their own answers. After all, that's part
of the fun! Let me try and clarify my own position, though, as
both a writer and a teacher.

As interactive artists, what we're learning to do is work with
a new medium: possibility. Although most people don't realize
it, there is indeed a purely objective side to this medium.
It's represented by a branch of statistics called probability.
When we create a work in this new medium and wonder how people
will interact with it, the main thing we want to get a handle
on is What are all the different possible realizations one can
coax out of this piece of hypermedia? If it's a hypertext,
there is a certain finite number of different readings that one
can generate from it by following different routes through the
text. That number will be vastly large and there's no way the
author can try out every reading to see if they all "work." Yet
one can use the laws of probabilty to get some understanding of
how readings are likely to take shape.

One simple example: You can calculate the probability of a
reader encountering a particular node in a hypertext by looking
at how many pathways are open to it from other points in the
hypertext, how many other pathways could possibly steer readers
away from that node before they get there, etc. If the work is
on the Web, you can also use counters to collect data on how
many people actually visit each node in a hypertext. It may
turn out that some elements the author considers crucial to the
work are so deeply buried that only one in 100 readers is ever
likely to encounter them. If one of these buried nodes is the
only "gateway" into a large portion of the hypertext, it may
render a good percentage of the entire work practically
inaccessible to most readers.

Sure this situation isn't entirely parallel with a sculpture
collapsing under its own weight, but the end result can be
pretty similar: The sculptor thinks he's created an image of a
whole man, but people are actually going to see a man with one
arm, because the other arm will fall off. The writer thinks
he's created one thing, but the reader is actually going to
experience something else--a truncated version. The biggest
difference may be that the sculpture will probably be withdrawn
from the public arena and fixed (re-designed), but the
hypertext probably won't be. Why is this?

There can be many other ways in which it may turn out that most
readers are experiencing a hypertext in a different way than
the writer had imagined--ways that might shock the writer. The
reader's objective experience of the work--that is, the words
that actually pass through his eyes to his brain--is quite a
different thing from his interpretation of the work.

On to your next question: Does interaction necessarily kill
artistic autonomy? Hypertext writing is widely advertised as
making the reader an equal collaborator in creating the work.
How accurate is this notion really, though? The reader doesn't
actually create any of the text (unless the work is a true
collaborative writing project, which is something quite
distinct from interactivity in my mind). The hypertext reader
can merely rearrange or reconfigure pre-existing material.

In most hypertexts, the reader actually has relatively little
direct control over perhaps the most important aspect of the
work. Usually she has no conception of the large-scale
structural possibilities and can merely choose links that look
interesting on a purely local level. The final shape of the
reading that the reader "constructs" is ultimately determined
more by chance or the laws of probability than by the reader's
personality or beliefs or insights. If you compare the
different readings of one hypertext that are produced by
several different readers, you'll be unlikely to see each of
these readings as a unique artistic vision or expression on the
part of the reader who created it. On the other hand, the text
of all the readings will bear the strong personal imprint of
the author.

I think it's a drawback of most hypertext systems that they
give the reader so little real control over things. How can we
give the reader real power? I think, ironically, the answer is
for the writer to put more of his own autonomous personality
into the work. If the hypertext is to let the reader
deliberately and consciously shape the large-scale structure of
the work, the software must have built into it some of the
author's understanding of how everything fits together into the
big picture. The author will have to build elements of his own
creative process--digital surrogates for his own judgment--into
the software so that the reader can tap into this and use it.
When the software "understands" the significance of how the
elements of the story or poem can interact with each other,
only then will it be able to pass this understanding onto the
reader so that it can inform the reader's decisions.

The author never disappears from the text. I feel that the more
real control I turn over to the reader by opening up the inner
workings of my own creative process, the more distinctively I
put my personal imprint on work.

Judy Malloy
Thanks Rob for the excellent analysis of the hyperfiction tension between
the writers' vision and the reader's shaping of the work. I think Jim
Rosenberg has a word for this but right now I can't find his article and
I can't remember the word.

It seems to work better to either totally throw out control as in a
collaborative work (which I do consider a kind of interactivity) *or* to
accept the author's vision as central to the work and use interactivity
to enhance that. What seems not to work so well (although there are
probably artists or writers who can make this work), is the idea of
interactivity as embroidering on an authored work - ie here is my story,
now I want to make this interactive so you can write something in this
little blank. (ugh)

An example of how I changed the interface after observing how it was used:
THE YELLOW BOWL was designed with the idea that readers would move
in and out of two connected narratives, but one narrative was more linear,
with more of a traditional storyline and I found that readers were simply
staying on that track which totally destroyed the way it worked - the whole
idea was the contrast between the narrator's thoughts and the story she was
telling. The narrator was a recently divorced parent, so part of the work
was about what parents tell children as opposed to what they are really thinking,
it was also about how writers distort experience. So, I had to redesign the
interface so that readers were pathed in and out of these parallel tracks
rather than leaving the choice entirely up to them.

Some folks would say this made the work less interactive. From your
point of view, tho, Rob, I was interacting with the reader, taking the
reader into account and that too is a kind of interactivity. I hadn't
really thought of it this way before.

My art institute class seemed to react pretty well to the idea of
observing how others exprienced their work and possibly reshaping it
based on that observation. (Tim, their pages are linked off of
http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/sfai.html - click on class pages)

Rob, two questions - (answer what you want to)

1. It would be great to hear about how you are teaching hyperfiction via
online "distance education".

2. What are you working on now? Where is your work heading?

Robert Kendall
I think you're right, Judy, about maintaining the distinctions
between interaction and true collaboration. I don't think
there's really a natural continuum between interacting with a
hypertext and actually sitting down and collaborating with
another writer, though people sometimes claim that one
inevitably leads to the other--that a truly interactive text
should let one "fill in the blanks," as you say. I think that
most readers simply don't *want* to write their own texts. They
come to the work of a writer for something else.
Open-invitation collaborations, such as those popping up all
over the Web, are great, don't get me wrong. But I think
there's a different motivation at work here.

The change you made to The Yellow Bowl doesn't sound to me like watering
down the interaction, though as you say, some people would claim that. I think
we have to accept that what the reader is really interacting with is our own
understanding of the elements in the text. The more of our understanding we
put into the hypertext, the more there is for the reader to interact with.
Every time we add a link to a hypertext we're signalling the reader that we
perceive a meaningful relationship between two nodes. We're passing our knowledge
of this on to the reader. The more of these relationships we identify, the
more options the reader has. If we don't pass on to the reader our knowledge
of meaningful ways in which these small-scale relationships can accumulate
into more meaningful large-scale structures, however, then we're actually
limiting the reader's options. Forcing the reader to repeatedly select more
or less randomly from a large assortment of links, which may or may not let
her uncover meaningful large-scale shapes, is not true "empowerment." On the
other hand, giving the reader a few choices that are always structurally significant
at each point of interaction is giving her real power. Sometimes less is more.

In answer to your questions:

1) I really love teaching my online hypertext class. It's all done over
the Web, and we actually use the same CAUCUS software system that we're using
here for this dialogue. I've had students sign up from all over the US, and
have had a couple from Canada and a couple from France. Eliminating geographical
boundaries and work schedule restraints (all the interaction occurs asynchronously
rather than in real time) really brings together an interesting mix of people.
We've had endless amounts of stimulating discussion and some really good hypertext
writing has come out of the class. Without real-time constraints, discussions
can take on much more depth than they can in a classroom. I can also have
online guests "appear" in the class from all over the country. The course
is partly an introduction to hypertext literature, partly a workshop. Students
create their own projects in Storyspace or HTML, then upload them for comment.
Here's a link to more information about the class for anyone who's interested.

2) My current project is tentatively titled The Visitation of St. America
(A Televisionary Hypertext) and conceived for the Web. It's still in it's
early stages, and I'm not sure exactly how it will evolve, but it centers
around the metaphor of channel surfing from inside the TV. The narrator wanders
in and out of various cliche TV situations. I regard the stereotypes and stock
characters of popular entertainment as the mythology of our culture. I think
the murder-mystery detective, the cowboy with the black hat, the cowboy with
the white hat, the James Bond type, etc., are in a way archetypes of a cultural
collective unconscious, and that's why we find them so compelling. In the
new hypertext, I'm attempting to explore some of this subterranean territory
by diving into the maw of the one-eyed monster that sits in our living rooms.
This has been a strong thematic concern of my poetry for at least ten years,
but the TV-like nature of the Web provides the perfect medium for it.

I plan to use Javascript for the dynamic elements that I feel
are essential in my hypertext. I originally conceived it as a
fairly simple, small-scale project, but hypertexts seem to take
on a life of their own and get bigger and bigger. It may end up
ultimately involving a lot of complex programming in Java.

Judy Malloy
Thanks Rob! You've been a great guest.
A final question - Do you have any thoughts about the future of
hyperfiction, hypertext poetry, electronic literature of all kinds?

Robert Kendall
Well, thank *you*, Judy. It's been great to be here!

It's really quite fascinating to think about the road ahead for
electronic literature. Will the genre continue to evolve and
attract new readers? Or is it merely a phenomenon that is so
closely tied to historical circumstances--namely,
Deconstructionist theory and Postmodernism--that it will fade
away when the next upstart young ism comes along to rebel
against the musty writing of the older generations (in other
words, us)? I believe that the motivation behind interactive
text extends well beyond its being merely an "actualization" of
currently popular lit crit theory, which for many is its main
selling point now. Whether the current wave of interest in
hyperwriting subsides or continues to swell, I think other
waves of activity will come ashore as well, prompting all sorts
of electronic literary explorations from new ideological
viewpoints--some of them perhaps diametrically opposed to the
ones prevalent today.

I think a lot will depend upon how quickly literary publishing
in general becomes successful and widespread on the Web. If
major poets and fiction writers are publishing new (linear)
work regularly on the Web, they'll be much more likely to try
their hand at hypertext, if for no other reason than because
it's there. Artistic creativity dislikes untapped possibilities.

As hypertext matures, I think we'll see two major trends: the
software will become more sophisticated, making it much easier
to read and navigate, and it will absorb more and more elements
from other types of electronic writing. In America, electronic
literature is pretty much equated with hypertext literature,
but there are other interesting categories of work as well,
such as kinetic visual texts and algorithmically generated
texts. I spent some time in Geneva last year, where I met a lot
of French writers working in the electronic medium.
Interestingly, the situation in France and Switzerland seems to
be the reverse of what it is here, in the sense that there is
more interest in animated and algorithmic text than there is in
hypertext. I think eventually these other types of electronic
writing will gain more momentum on this side of the ocean.

I think somebody's also bound to successfully turn the wildly
popular medium of the video game directly to the purposes of
serious literature. A number of good writers made attempts at
this in the mid 80s, but the efforts never really broke out of
the molds of genre entertainment.

Perhaps the most intriguing question mark of all is artificial
intelligence. Nobody knows whether computers will ever be able
to really think . . . but if computer-simulated thought can
humble the world's foremost chess grandmaster, it can certainly
someday play a valuable role in electronic poetry and fiction.
With artificial intelligence, the question "Does the writer
disappear in electronic work" really starts to get interesting.
One of the many articles on the recent overthrow of Kasparov
correctly pointed out that it wasn't really Deep Blue who beat
him--it was a team of IBM engineers and chess consultants. It
was their knowledge of the problems of chess, supplemented by a
lot of real-time number-crunching power, that Kasparov was
competing against. Similarly, I think it will be a long time
before one can really say that the computer wrote the poem or
the story rather just realizing the ideas of the writer. I
doubt a time will ever come when human creativity will be truly
unmoored from humanity. But I could be wrong.

Anna Couey
Rob, in case you do make it back here - this conversation has been
fascinating. I do take issue with the separation you make between
interactivity and collaborative art making. Interactivity can take
many forms, but, even in your definition of it, it implies a
relationship with the reader or viewer. Central to my work, which
I do define as interactive, is the idea of art as a conversation
between artist-originator and artist-participants; that it's not
a fixed expression written by a single person. I certainly agree
that this is not a form of working that necessarily draws everyone
in, and such work may not at this stage have an ultimate result
that is as refined as an individually authored work. I struggle with
those issues and others in doing this type of work. But meaning doesn't
inherently lie solely in the voice of an individual artist, even
though it can, powerfully.